X

Diigo adds social network features

At DemoFall 2007: a powerful research tool gets new social network features.

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman
2 min read

Diigo (previous coverage) makes a rich and complex online tool kit. It's a product that's easily dismissed as yet another social-bookmarking tool, yet another Web "clip" saver, or yet another Web page annotator. It is all those things, which makes for a tough pitch. But it's a powerful tool that several people I know swear by.

Diigo lets your community annotate Web pages. Diigo

At the DemoFall 2007 conference tomorrow, the company will be showing off the 3.0 version (which should go into public beta in a few weeks) that CEO Wade Ren previewed for me recently. It pushes on the social angle: it creates a "content-centric social network," in which people are connected by what they clip, tag, and highlight. Users will be able to find their "neighbors," based not on who is a friend to whom, but rather by who is interested in what. It's actually somewhat similar to Digg's new social network, although Diigo has a much smaller and more serious user community, and a more robust tool set for its users.

I've said before that Diigo's rich tools will reward commitment, quite unlike many current Web 2.0 products that give you instant gratification but don't have much depth. Diigo's new social features add to the product's strength, but they don't make it any easier to get into. I'm looking forward to the demo of this product to see if the audience truly gets what they are looking at.

A Facebook version of Diigo is coming soon, too. That should be very interesting.

See also: Del.icio.us, Clipmarks, ActiveWeave, Jeteye.